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Saturday, 11 January 2014

QlikView advantage over query based BI

Query-based BI tools have been in and around for decades for decision
support. Variations of query-based BI software are on the market, Some
are flexible and others are high-performance.
But they all share one critical flaw: they are unable to inherently maintain associations among data elements
:

Query-based tools divorce data from its context. People making complex
business decisions don’t always have full access to their supporting
data, even when they have access to BI software.
Some data is available only as isolated and discrete queries, without
context between one query and the next. This leaves gaps for people
trying to make data-driven business decisions.

With query-based tools, creating associations among all available data
elements would require a business analyst or IT professional to cram
every associated field into a single query, a nearly impossible task.
The alternative hard coding associations among queries into the application layer is equally daunting.

QlikView is the world’s first associative, in-memory business
intelligence platform. QlikView manages associations among data sets at
the engine level, not the application level, by storing individual
tables in its in-memory associative engine.
Every data point in the analytic dataset is associated with every other
data point in the dataset. Datasets can be hundreds of tables with
thousands of fields. Unlike traditional query-based BI tools, when the
QlikView user selects a data point, no queries are fired.
Instead, all the other fields instantaneously filter and re-aggregate
themselves based on the user’s selection. Selections are highlighted in
green. Datasets related to the selection are highlighted in white.
Unrelated data is highlighted in gray. This provides a very intuitive,
user-friendly way for people to navigate their data on their way to
business insight.

Query-based BI tools separate the application layer from the data layer.
This leads to long deployments while expensive developers customize the
application layer to manage the specific associations required to
answer a particular business question.

When the BI application needs to answer a slightly different business
question, the application layer must be altered again, which is
time-consuming and expensive.
With QlikView, any and all aggregates are recalculated in real time,
regardless of the source fields. All associations are stored generically
against the entire dataset, ready to answer any business question as it
comes up without requiring any customization. The data from all tables
is always available in context and ready to answer the next business
question.